2016/06/17

Jacqueline Wedlake Hatton

My recent work is focussed on small pockets of ancient woodlands on Dartmoor such as Wistman’s Wood and Hucken Tor. These I have chosen because of their wildness and for the unusual shapes of the trees there. The habitats of the moorland trees is very specific in terms of altitude and terrain. This geology results in unusual growth patterns and a proliferation of mosses which grow on the trees and everything around them. I am Cornish and to some extent my work pays homage to the ancient Cornish culture which is so bound up with nature and the landscape. However, it also references the processes and influences of technology and how those infiltrate our experience of even the most natural sites in our landscape.

Insider, Oil on canvas, 1 m x 1 m, 2015

I have allowed my love of the beauty of woodlands a free rein in my recent paintings. However, I find that other themes emerge and what appears on the canvas is more than a simple image of woodland. Intuitive gestures made with paint belie the complexity of the relationship between circumstance, locality and context. The ancient trees that are my current subject are so old that they represent the concept of time, they link my consciousness to the lives of my ancestors and their scarcity is a reminder of the deforestation that is so threatening in our post-modern era. So a landscape painting is never just a landscape but has this interestingly dream like aspect, interwoven and interconnecting, where all of those themes coincide.

Fogged, oil on canvas, 1 m x 1.20 m, 2016

With regard to the process that initiated my current work, locating my 'voice' is a triangulation between memory, photography and canvas or hand, eye and mind. What I have found is that my voice is an amalgam, its constituent parts being those of myself, with mechanical processes and products - such as photography. I am surprised and intrigued by the way these aspects blend together on the canvas.